Industrial concerns, such as hospitals, welding shops, chemical processing plants and similar businesses, use large number of cylinders of industrial gases. Cylinders are delivered to such businesses in full condition and picked up after use. The cylinders are heavy, expensive and must be carefully stored. Methods for distribution and inventory control have been a subject of much research over the years. For example, see the paper in Interfaces 13, 6 Dec. 1983, p. 4-23 entitled “Improving the Distribution of Industrial Gages with an On-Line Computerized Routing and Scheduling Optimizer” by W. J. Bell et al. The article describes the efforts of Air Products and Chemicals, Inc. to implement industrial gas cylinder inventory management at customer locations with delivery vehicle scheduling. A sophisticated software algorithm for the project is described. An essential part of the gas cylinder management problem is knowing the present inventory of full and empty tanks. Usually a customer is responsible for inventory status and different customers have different approaches.
In U.S. Pat. No. 7,619,523 to F. Durtschi et al. describe “Gas Cylinders Monitoring by Wireless Tags”. In this system, each gas cylinder includes a RDID transponder configured to transmit a RFID signal received by a RFID receiver connected to a server. The gas cylinder data received by the server is collected in a database and thereafter used by a gas cylinder management software application. Published Patent Application 2011/0140850 describes a transport cap for gas cylinders where the cap supports RFID devices for gas cylinder tracking. A generic tank monitoring system is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 7,304,588 to D. Ingalsbe et al. In published U.S. Patent Application 2014/0163727 to Y. Siaamer et al. describe a gas cylinder management system where tanks are identified by optically sensing the color markings of a tank or for detecting ferromagnetic material identifiers. In U.S. Pat. No. 5,505,473 to F. Radcliffe discloses a mobile cart with shelves with radio communication of inventory on the shelves. A scanner can identify the inventory and communicates with a terminal regarding the location identifiers.
An object of the invention is to monitor use of tank cylinders at end user locations and report used tanks to a tank management cylinder system.